“Almost everybody has more talent than me. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not.” It does sound like a joke because the speaker is Adam Mars-Jones, who is not one of the most famous but certainly one of the best British writers of his generation. He was, for example, named as one of Granta’s best young British novelists in both 1983 and 1993 – before he even published a novel.
Well, now he has – and how. This month sees the publication of Caret, the third volume in Mars-Jones’s “semi-infinite” saga of the life of John Cromer, a funny, eccentric, pedantic man in 20th-century Cambridge. The series of novels – before Caret came Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011) – feels like the best kept secret in 21st-century English fiction.
Mars-Jones, like his narrator, is gossipy and talkative, and always ready with a freshly-minted turn of phrase. He’s speaking to me from his holiday home in France. “My partner was going to buy the oldest house in Lowestoft, and I explained to him that we would need couples counselling if that took place. So we holiday here.” And Lowestoft is…? “It’s the easternmost town in Britain. They call it the sunrise town, desperately. Benjamin Britten was born there, couldn’t wait to get out.”
On Caret, Mars-Jones is immediately keen to brace the prospective reader. This is because the novel’s qualities – wit, dexterity, intelligence and all-round delight – are contained with a story that sounds niche-within-niche: John Cromer is a severely disabled, gay, vegetarian Englishman who becomes a Hindu and spends a lot of time in India. He can barely move his limbs and gets around in a wheelchair and specially adapted Mini.
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“I find this material very rich and I forget how unattractive it is. In general able-bodied people don’t want to read about disability because it’s a minority they don’t want to join, and disabled people don’t need to.” He likens the book to a durian fruit. “In other words, something that smells like rotten flesh and tastes like chocolate. It’s something that needs to be tasted rather than smelt.”
And there is plenty of literary chocolate in Caret, as there was in Pilcrow and Cedilla. The books are long because they take a minutely attentive approach to John’s life, and now, after the first two books which showed his childhood and life at university, we follow John as he moves into his own home. John being no victim, this involves battles with his carer, a satisfying sexual liaison and a period of jury duty (where John, inevitably, takes charge), among dozens of minor and deliciously described events.
But bearing in mind that this third volume comes a dozen years after the last it might be worth recapping on how we got here. Where did the idea first come from for such an eccentric project?
“It’s based on a friend’s life. I met him in 1974 [at Cambridge university]. His life is very much as described, and he was clearly very unusual. And we were all told that he would have a short lifetime. In fact he died just last year, aged 72. [But] in 1996, I was reviewing [the film] Trainspotting on the World Service, and he heard it under a tamarind tree in Tamil Nadu! And recognising my voice, he said to his Tamil carer, ‘I know that guy!’ and his carer went, ‘sure you do’.
“So he got back in touch with me to prove he was right. I’d expected him to be at the very edge of life, but he was incredibly lively and bossy. And he told me a story, and I said, ‘if that was properly written it would be one of the great stories of world literature.’ And he said, ‘Well, do you want to write it?’”
John in the book is physically powerless, and Mars-Jones admits that “maybe this goes against the grain of what people want. But I don’t understand the craze for superhero movies, why it’s entertaining having to invent obstacles to ridiculously exaggerated powers. From the outside everything in John’s life is negative. It’s pain, isolation, stigma. But that’s not his life! And I wanted to give him life by saturating every page with delight of different sorts: linguistic, comedic, lyrical.”
I get the sense that Mars-Jones – who has previously written fiction about Aids, abusive relationships, and now severe disability – would hate his writing to be viewed as “tackling issues”.
“I felt that a book of this size could be both serious and trivial, earnest and frivolous, comic and tragic, all of those things,” he says. “It’s obviously not a sermon. But it would be mad if it had no social conscience about the position of disabled people. And one thing I find really amusing – bearing in mind I started writing it in 1996 – is that it is both an indefensible act of appropriation and a laudable attempt to express hyper-marginalised experiences! It’s both. It’s everything.”
The sheer length of the John Cromer volumes means that there have been long gaps in Mars-Jones’s writing. He could presumably have had one of those careers like many of his fellow Granta alumni, putting out a new novel every two or three years.
“I don’t envy those careers,” he says, “because to do that I would have to develop a more consistent technique. For me it’s the project that creates the skills, not the other way around.” And “I don’t like starting things, so having some huge thing in progress is quite a relief”.
But also, he says, “the careers you talk about no longer work anyway. Even someone who’s had a tremendous amount of success, like Sally Rooney, is slightly stuck, having produced two books and then a third, where she gave interviews talking about how she didn’t sign up to having her privacy stripped away, while posing for a photographer with a hawk on her wrist. It’s difficult, to be over-exposed and rewarded – then penalised for doing pretty much the same thing.”
As well as a novelist Mars-Jones has a sharp reputation as a literary critic. He never receives the mediocre lying down – “my weakness as a critic,” he says, “is I judge things by their weakest element” – though the corollary is that his praise has real meaning. (He was one of the first critics to recognise the brilliance of Anne Enright’s The Gathering.) So, I wonder, what does he find really good in contemporary fiction?
“Well, I certainly gave Eimear McBride[’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing] quite a rave review when it came out.” That was 10 years ago! “Okay! okay! I’m sure I can find things that I’ve liked.” (Later he emails with two suggestions: Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life.) He adds that he doesn’t read much contemporary fiction – because everyone has more talent than him. “Every time I read a page of Updike it’s depressing because the guy seems to have no weak spots even when he’s off form.”
And what’s next, I wonder? Bearing in mind that Caret’s 750 pages cover just six months of John Cromer’s life, will the story ever be finished? “It’s the flight of the arrow that is interesting, not the target,” he says. “The target is virtually irrelevant. Do you think Proust would be not read if the last volume had not even been sketched out? I don’t think that’s why you embark on it, you embark on it because it’s Proust.”
As to the writing process itself for such a mammoth project, perhaps he can adopt the same approach he did for Caret. “I got Keith, my partner, to write on the back of a postcard, IT CAN ALL BE DONE, and pinned it to the back of the front door. I find that so much more reassuring than someone saying, ‘darling, you’re a genius.’ Instead, ‘it can all be done’.”
Caret by Adam Mars-Jones is published by Faber & Faber on August 17th
